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❄️ Gorgeous snowfall in NYC today.

A stranger at a coffee shop warned me not to face the windows, lest I be too distracted to read.

“I’ll make no such promise,” I told them.

One hour of daydreaming later, I had to take their advice. ❤️

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🛸 For those who have a hard time describing their emotions—the feelings wheel.

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🎵 New A$AP Rocky album exceeded expectations. Production is top-tier, Danny Elfman & Tim Burton made great contributions, & the features (especially Doechii) all killed it. Here is a great interview with A$AP talking about the album.

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📚 Books for Q1:

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✏️ New Word Learned:

Shoobie: a slang term, mainly used in New Jersey, Delaware, and Southern California, for a tourist or day-tripper visiting a seashore area, often seen as an outsider or someone unfamiliar with local customs.

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💉 Apologies if blood makes you queasy! But here’s the easiest way to make a massive difference in your community—literally, while lying down. NYC residents can set their appointment here. 🙃

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📰 Multiple people sent me this article on play:

We can draw lessons from game-playing as we try to navigate a reality ruled by rankings & metrics. In the real world, as in the game world, scores are motivating & clarifying; they can help groups of people coalesce around shared goals. But real-world scores, like game scores, are also reductive… [People] must also be clear about their individual purposes, which are different, nuanced, & harder to communicate. If they focus only on the score, they’ll lose track of what counts.

I am double-downing on my commitment to play in 2026.

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💼 Anil Dash’s questions for knowing if that job will crush your soul:

  • If what you do succeeds, will the world be better?
  • Whose money do they have to take to stay in business?
  • What do you have to believe to think that they’re going to succeed? In what way does the world have to change or not change?
  • Do you have evidence of leaders in the organization making hard choices to do the right thing?
  • Does your actual compensation take care of what you need for all of your current goals and needs — from day one?
  • Is the role you’re being hired into one where you can credibly advance, and where there’s sufficient resources for success?

Co-signing the entire post.

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💬 Quote by Elizabeth Peabody, per Austin Kleon’s newsletter:

The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth. The holy sensibilities of genius — for all the sensibilities of genius are holy — keep their possessor essentially unhurt as long as animal spirits and the idea of being young last; but the perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth; when the world comes to them, not with the song of the siren, against which all books warn us, but as a wise old man counselling acquiescence in what is below them.

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📩 Dustin Henry just wrote a great newsletter about his “WHY” for continuing do music journalism. I suspect my friends and folks on micro.blog will enjoy. You can read it here.

Selfishly, it fortified my subpar confidence in the post I just published about a song from Peter Gabriel’s Melt album.

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✍️ I don’t mean to sound haughty, but I think I just wrote the best breakdown of Peter Gabriel’s “And Through The Wire” you’ve ever read. Available now at bradley-andrews.com

(P.S. - it’s altogether possible that this is the only breakdown existing on the internet)

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🎵 From the new CDs & a few online finds:

Shrek did Sly dirty on this one. Also, brief essay on Peter Gabriel coming soon. 👀

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🎵 3 new CD’s added to the growing stash today, found at Record Whirled in Brooklyn for a great price:

  • Peter Gabriel (3) Album
  • Prince’s Self-Titled Album
  • Sly and the Family Stone Greatest Hits Album
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💭 Listened to a remarkable conversation with Karl Ove Knausgaard & Zadie Smith from 2019 that was too good not to share:

I wasn’t aware the book was about shame, because I am so full of shame—and that was the way I thought the world was. But I’m very interested in shame because that’s the point where kind of the outer world and the social world enters the inner world and inner self. And that’s what’s the stake in this book is, it’s the division between the inner and the outer— and the shame is the outer world being in you.

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🇻🇪 It has no real bearing on my life, but knowing that Venezuelan President Maduro is being held in a Brooklyn prison roughly three miles from my apartment makes me feel strange.

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📚 I love having friends who read because they make end-of-year roundups that become my going-to-read pile. From Pynchon to Faulkner to Tulathimute, here is a good list from a great friend: Xander Paul’s Roundup.

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🎥 The folks at The Big Picture podcast argue in a recent episode that the movie of the century (so far) is The Social Network. I was skeptical at first, but the subject material alone makes it a good argument. I gotta ponder this one…

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💬 A great quote, brought to my attention by @robertbreen :

Poetry is language against which we have no defenses. — David Whyte

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📚 Three gentle & insightful essays about resolutions, goals, and rhythms from Hayley Nahman:

I think the concepts really square with my experience and help temper the common excesses of productivity culture.

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💬 Since I made a New Years post about Auden’s poem Under Which Lyre, I’d be remiss not to mention a different poem of his, New Year Letter, on this day as well. Here is the opening:

Under the familiar weight Of winter, conscience and the State, In loose formations of good cheer, Love, language, loneliness and fear, Towards the habits of next year, Along the streets the people flow, Singing or sighing as they go: Exalte, piano, or in doubt, All our reflections turn about A common meditative norm, Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform.